Species with similar resource requirements are commonly assumed to competitively exclude each other, unless they differentiate their ecological niches. Hence, parasitoid wasps that use the same host species need to find some way to avoid competition. The aim of this study was to identify the role of volatile cues from oilseed rape plants and the larval host in niche separation between three coe...

D ihydroflavonol 4-reductase from Petunia flowers ca ta ­ lyzes the reduction of d ihydroquercetin to leucocyanidin and , in particular, of dihydrom yricetin to leucodelphinid in , w hereas reduction of the simple dihydroflavonol dihydrokaem pferol to leucopelargonidin could not be observed. This special substra te specificity o f d ihydroflavonol 4-re­ ductase is most p robably the reason for ...

The interactions between bees that depend on floral oil for their larvae and flowers that offer oil involve an intricate mix of obligate and facultative mutualisms. Using recent phylogenies, new data on oil-offering Cucurbitaceae, and molecular-dating, we ask when and how often oil-offering flowers and oil-foraging bees evolved, and how frequently these traits were lost in the cause of evolutio...

MADS-domain proteins are important transcription factors involved in many aspects of plant reproductive development. In this study, a MADS-box gene, Glycine max AGAMOUS-LIKE1 (GmAGL1), was isolated from soybean flower. The transcript of GmAGL1 was expressed in flowers and pods of different stages in soybean and was highly expressed in carpels. GmAGL1 is a nucleus-localized transcription factor ...

The temporal and spatial scales employed by foraging bees in sampling their environment and making foraging decisions should depend both on the limits of bumble bee memory and on the spatial and temporal pattern of rewards in the habitat. We analyzed data from previous experiments to determine how recent foraging experience by bumble bees affects their flight distances to subsequent flowers. A ...

In this paper, we presented a theoretical result and then discussed possible applications of our result to SDR problems. In addition to providing insights into existing SDR methods when Y is univariate; our theorem also applies to multivariate responses, especially when the response takes the form of ðY ;W Þ, where Y is a continuous variable and W is categorical. r 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights...

Sufficient dimension reduction aims at finding transformations of predictor X without losing any regression information of Y versus X . If we are only interested in the information contained in the mean function or the kth moment function of Y given X , estimation of the central mean space or the central kth moment space becomes our focus. However, existing estimators for the central mean space...

The requirement of constant censoring parameter β in Koziol–Green (KG) model is too restrictive. When covariates are present, the conditional KG model (Veraverbekea and Cadarso-Suárez, 2000) which allows β to be dependent on the covariates is more realistic. In this paper, using sufficient dimension reduction methods, we provide a model-free diagnostic tool to test if β is a function of the cov...

The flavonoids are a group of low molecular weight, naturally occurring, plant products widely distributed in the vegetarian kingdom and all are based on the parent compound flavone (2phenylchromone or 2-phenylbenzopyrone). They occur in fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds leaves, flowers and barks. The average daily western diet contains about 1 g of mixed flavonoids, an amount that might be suffi...